WWII supersubs found

Nation & World

November 13, 2009|By Thomas H. Maugh II, Tribune Newspapers

U.S. researchers said Thursday they have located the remains of two high-tech Japanese submarines that were scuttled by the U.S. Navy off Hawaii in 1946 to prevent the technology from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War.

One of the crafts was the largestnon-nuclearsubever built and had the ability to sail 1 1/2 times around the globe without refueling. Called the I-14, the behemoth was 400 feet long, 40 feet high, and carried a crew of 144. It was designed to launch two folding-wing bombers on kamikaze missions against U. S. cities such as New York and Washington, D.C.,although the end of the war prevented such attacks.

The second was an attack submarine called the I-201, whose design foreshadowed the sleek submarines of today, and which was thought to be twice as fast submerged as any American subsusedin thewar. It never fought in the war either.

"In their time, they were very revolutionary," said retired Col. Robert Hackett, a military historian at Combined Fleet. com, an online collection of information about the Imperial Japanese Navy.

He was not involved in the find. "We were quite interested in the technology."

The two subs are among five that were captured at war's end and brought to Hawaii, then sunk off Oahu after U.S. technicians had discovered all their secrets. One of the five, the I-401, which carried three aircraft, was discovered on St. Patrick's Day in 2005, but the search for the others had proved futile.

But the news of that find stimulated Navy veterans to contact the team with more information, said Terry Kerby,operations director at the Hawaii Undersea Research Lab, a University of Hawaii research center funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In particular, the team was put in contact with Charles Alger, who was chief mate on the crew that sailed the I-14 to Hawaii. Alger, who died recently, filmed the sinking of the ship for U.S. naval intelligence.

When he played the footage for Kerby's team, researcherswere able to use landmarks on the shore to locate the approximate site of the sinking.